Netherland

Netherland is a novel by Joseph O'Neill, published in 2008. It is about a Dutchman living in New York after the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the game of cricket he takes up there.

Hans van den Broek is a financial analyst, and the book opens with him being interviewed by a reporter in London about the death of his friend Khamraj Ramkisson, whom Hans knows as Chuck. The account then goes back to the years he spent in New York before and just after the attacks, when he and his wife Rachel and their son Jake were living in a run-down apartment close to the World Trade Center.

The family could not bring themselves to go back to the apartment afterwards, and Rachel eventually took their son home to England, which left Hans marooned among the residents of the Chelsea Hotel. It is Chuck, a Trinidadian immigrant, who brings him into the world of the Staten Island Cricket Club and into a friendship that gives him a way to think about the city he is living in.

The novel was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and it is one of the books that came to be used to describe New York in the years after the attacks.